The Demand for Purity: Thought Reform in Trump’s MAGA, Part 4
Good vs. evil in Trump's America, "enemies within" and his fixation on origins
This special 10-part article will be posted weekdays through November 1.
On October 5, 2024, Donald Trump’s daughter in-law Lara Trump and co-chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), spoke at a Trump campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of an attempt on the former President’s life. Standing beside husband Eric, she said that the failed assassination was a divine miracle, repeating a GOP convention theme (see Mystical Manipulation in Trump’s MAGA). Then, she drew a sharp line through the Presidential race, declaring, “This is no longer a fight between Republican vs. Democrat, left vs. right, it is good vs. evil, and good is going to win this battle…”
Lara Trump's partisan bifurcation of good and evil recalls the demand for purity, another of Robert Jay Lifton’s themes of thought reform:
…the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The good and the pure are of course those ideas, feelings, and actions consistent with the totalist ideology and policy; anything else is apt to be relegated to the bad and the impure. Nothing human is immune from the flood of stern moral judgments. All “taints” and “poisons” that contribute to the existing state of impurity must be searched out and eliminated (Lifton, pp. 73).
The enemy within
Donald Trump in his 2024 campaign branded people – particularly Democrats who stand in his way – as enemies of America. Trump told a Fox News interviewer that America’s biggest election day security problem was “the enemy within” including “radical left lunatics.” In the same interview he responded to a question about undermining by government bureaucrats, saying, “we have two enemies, we have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within in my opinion is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries…” In a subsequent interview, he branded specific Democratic politicians with the enemy label “We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at [Adam] ‘Shifty’ Schiff and some of the others, yeah, they are to me the enemy from within. I think Nancy Pelosi is an enemy from within.”
…the experiential world is sharply divided into the pure and the impure, into the absolutely good and the absolutely evil.
Purity of party
If opposing Democrats are enemies of Trump’s MAGA, non-supportive Republican politicians are an impurity for the GOP to sift out. Earlier in 2024 as a candidate for RNC chair, Lara Trump said on her Right View broadcast that Republican candidates for the upcoming election cycle needed to be pro-Trump and pro-MAGA, pronouncing, “Anyone who is not on board with seeing Donald Trump as the 47th President, and America-loving, patriots, all the way down the ticket, being supported by the RNC, is welcome to leave… There’s no one more loyal to Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement, than this person you’re looking at right here…”
Lara Trump seems to equate a Republican politician’s patriotic love for America with support for her father-in-law.
Purity of individuals
At the level of the individual, Lifton writes that people experiencing the demand for purity can apply the same black-and-white polarization to their own character, and as a result become more angry and intolerant of people outside their group:
One must look at those impurities as originating from outside influences – that is, from the every-threatening world beyond the closed, totalist ken [one's range of knowledge or sight]. Therefore one may seek to relieve oneself of some of one’s burden of guilt by denouncing, continuously and hostilely, these same outside influences. The more guilty one feels, the greater the hatred, and the more threatening the outside influences seem (Lifton, p. 75, parentheses added).
Purity of origin
As a tangent to Lifton’s “‘taints’ and ‘poisons’” that “must be searched out and eliminated,” Donald Trump publicly fixates on the purity of people’s origins, whether ethnic, national or genetic:
He entered political life by claiming that then-President Barack Obama had not proven he was born in the United States and thus might not qualify to be president.
Trump challenged the ethnic identity of Kamala Harris, telling a 2024 National Association of Black Journalists convention audience that at some point she had “turned black.”
Trump launched his first Presidential campaign with a Trump Tower speech warning that Mexican immigration was bringing in drugs, crime and rapists. In the same speech he promised to “build a great, great wall on our southern border,” and said “I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”
On Hugh Hewitt’s October 7, 2024 show, Trump claimed Kamala Harris had allowed thousands of murderers – and their genes – to enter the country, saying, “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now, a murderer – I believe this – it’s in their genes. And we got bad – a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Trump told a December 2023 New Hampshire Rally that illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of America: “You know, when they let – I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country – when they do that, we’ve got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country, that’s what they’ve done.”
Trump’s fixation with genetic origins shows through in this exhaustive video summary of times Trump has connected others’ genes to their success.
Trump’s demands for purity have helped produce a movement polarized against his Democratic enemies, a GOP organized to weed out his non-supporters, and supporters mobilized to act on his origin fixations.
Navigation within this article series:
Thought Reform in Trump’s MAGA - Intro
Milieu Control in Trump's MAGA, Part 2
Mystical Manipulation in Trump's MAGA, Part 3
The Demand for Purity in Trump's MAGA, Part 4
The Cult of Confession in Trump’s MAGA, Part 5
Sacred Science in Trump’s MAGA, Part 6
Loading the Language in Trump’s MAGA, Part 7
Doctrine over Person in Trump’s MAGA, Part 8
The Dispensing of Existence in Trump’s MAGA, Part 9
Conclusion: Thought Reform in Trump’s MAGA, Part 10
References:
Lifton, Robert Jay (2019). Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry, The New Press.